Americans miss out on billions in stock gains

Financial crisis shook confidence

9:53 PM,
Dec. 26, 2012

Written by

Whitney Kisling
Bloomberg News

Americans have missed out on almost $200 billion of stock gains as they drained money from the market in the past four years, haunted by the financial crisis.

Assets in equity mutual, exchange-traded and closed-end funds increased about 85% to $5.6 trillion since the bull market began in March 2009, trailing the Standard & Poor's 500 Index's 94% advance, according to data compiled by Bloomberg and Morningstar. The proportion of retirement funds in stocks fell about 0.5 percentage point, compared with an average rise of 8.2 percentage points in rallies since 1990.